WHAT IS 'PLAY'?.....FOR MOST MEN, 'PLAY' IS 'COMBATIVE ANTAGONISM'

 



I was asked recently...."Have you 'played' FORGE OF EMPIRES or other 'creative' online games?"......Of course not.....unless the game could be "REDECORATE WINDSOR PALACE", "SYMPHONY-MAKER" or "WRITE A NOVEL WITH ONLINE WRITERS"...........I checked out the FOE site, anyway.....and halted, immediately, upon reading this: "Discover and conquer new territories!"

"Use your army strategically to fight exciting battles and gain control of new provinces. On the battle field you can either take on the computer or give other players a lesson in battle strategy. Recruit and develop a powerful army to steer the fate of your empire!
Your army is not strong enough or you do not want to fight? Each sector can be traded for different goods that you can produce in your goods buildings.
Once a whole province is in your possession, you can send out your scout to discover new territories."
PLAY? I think gamers have either mistaken what "play" is about.....opting for just more repetitiously violent and aggressive outlets, rather than experiencing mutually beneficial, creative interactions with other gentle humans. We are a reactive species, like other predators, regrettably.........."PICTIONARY", anyone? how about "GROUP THERAPY"?......"HOUSE?"......"PARCHEESI"? ....HOW ABOUT "DRESS UP"??





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tell Me A Story......How do ya make a chicken sneeze? C'mon, tell me a story! Then, I'll go to sleep......

Image
  yet another old photo, taken in the late 1970's, at 2793 P'tree Rd., with it's fragile emulsion separating from the underlying Ilford photographic paper.....Subjects: Tim Brogan and Katrina Motiska, Atlanta transplants from Allentown, Pa......from a Series....that did not utilize this photo....that I mounted and placed in a box for viewers to 'arrange as they will' to tell a 'Story' suggested by the photos....I placed small white 'stick-on's upon the reverse of the mounting boards, then calculated the 'correct order' of the photos that were chosen by a group of 13 viewers that had never before met the subjects of the Series, but who rearranged the photos into various orders of their own intentions, then verbalized The Interpretive Story that the photos depicted.........."Art School 'Keep Busy' Stuff".....
Read more

CONFABULATORIAL INTERSTITUAL COLLUSIONS FROM WITHIN THE COMPARTMENTALIZED MEMORY BANKS OF NOT QUITE RANDOM CHEMICAL CONNECTIONS THAT SURFACE, THEN DECAY, RECOMBINING AND RECONSTUCTURALIZING...AGAIN AND AGAIN....

Image
  ....from a note. over a dozen years ago, to a friend, whom, at that time, I knew as "Chaz" and with whom i've shared many 'dialogues' over the past couple of decades, although we have never met in the "real world", but only within the contexts of Myspace and Facebook: Re: mental illness as the burdensome lagniappe of Creativity...the compartmentalization, then unravelling, of associative collusions within the mass of cortical tissues......:.....It is not so much that eccentricity is incomprehensible, for  i don't seek to discover the periapsis of intellect or the common, intersections that we share......somewhere between 24 and 42, so to speak, wherein the trajectory of random thoughts collide in expressions that are both recognized as "real", yet, at the same instant, are transient and unknowable........i keep, at my bedside, 7 boxes, varying in both size and design, materials of construction and contents.......At one point in time....we...
Read more